The Future of Business Printing

 

Business printing constitutes not only those documents printed in an office environment, but all printing done for business purposes. This includes everything from business cards to stationary and promotional material. In fact, if you get your companies name printed on any type of object or surface, it constitutes as business printing. Yet what does the future hold for business printing? After all, printers are getting smarter and more impressive with a million little functions all rolled into one box. What’s the next best thing?

Business Printing Today

Business printing in today’s world is still by-and-large reminiscent of the 80’s corporate environment where photocopiers and printers dominate fair amounts of space within the office. Their use includes memos, reports, copies, faxes (in the case of combo printers) etc., and seem to be set in that groove for the next couple of years at least.

However when even looking at previous trends, we can see a gradual movement to less and less hardware in the office environment. Where not so long ago almost every workstation needed a printer to print, our printers are now networked – a single printer often catering for a whole floor of employees. In addition we’re now faced with technology not only capable of connecting printers on the network, but also managing them and the print jobs according to a variety of criteria we define.

In a similar breath however, we have to question the role of paper in the workplace as well. After all, even though we still require paper for a vast amount of purposes in the work place, digital documents are slowly taking over, therefore gradually eliminating the need for printing hardware.

Business Printing Tomorrow

Believe it or not, the future is already here. Business printing has already taken a new shape in the form of non-local printing, or out-sourced printing. Yet that’s still vague, seeing as this was possible even before the internet started to take off, with printing shops around every corner.

Our focus is directed at those enterprises whose sole purpose it is to provide online business printing solutions to businesses on a national scale and therefore minimising the need for a variety of expensive equipment. They are commonly known as online printers and are, more often than not, capable of fulfilling all corporate printing needs. This not only includes everyday office printing jobs like reports, forms and memos, but also marketing material such as business cards, direct mail postcards and brochures as well as office stationary in the shape of notepads and pens.

There is however one drawback associated with online business printing: even though printing jobs can be completed in a timely fashion, their most economic option for delivery usually depends on standard national post office speeds, which is perhaps still why most businesses keep a printer or two handy for those “right now” business printing needs. Yet we can only suspect that it will merely be a matter of years before “snail mail” catches up to its electronic variant and therefore heralding the age of a printerless office.

 

Article created on 6/8/2009

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